Hey all - Just a heads up that I'm slowly migrating (and revamping) what I consider to be the better posts from this blog over to the new, fancy version over at http://www.volleydork.com The .blog site has served me well when I was a volunteer assistant and had no following. But now I've got like [...]
Computer Vision – Updated July 10, 2022
Original Post --- Update #1 Time for a quick recap of everything we've been working on and the progress we've made thus far!! Player Tracking So to start, step 1 was just to be able to detect and track all the players on the court. Not quite as simple as it sounds, as you can [...]
2022 NCAA Tournament – The Finals
Many thanks as always to Professor Dwight Wynne for the win probability math and match charts!! national championship match: Texas opened the match with a 72% chance to win. After taking the first set, this improved to 84%. After going ahead 2-0 after a second set beatdown of 25-14, Texas had a 95% win probability. [...]
Step 14.1 Computer Vision (update)
Quick update on our original post. We've mostly solved the "players switching sides while jumping" problem and have also jumped into the rabbit hole of ball tracking as well. I'm not going to get into the technical details here - more just give a glimpse into what we've been working on and where we are [...]
Bonus Post – NCAA Final Four / Stivrins Impact
Figured we'd throw a super quick Final Four + Stivrins post together just to wrap up the 2021 season as everyone shifts their attention to the transfer portal and freaks out about the seasonal coaching reshuffle. Starting with the semifinals, below are the Match Win Probability charts - visually describing a team's likelihood to win [...]
Volleydork Ratings / Predictions Recap
So...what was the point again? Honestly, we didn't set out to make a ratings system. We were building our xPWP model (expected Point Win Probability) and needed a reasonably accurate estimate of the initial chance of each team winning the point (ex: Nebraska serving to Wisconsin, before the serve happens, how likely is Nebraska to [...]
Step 14 – Computer Vision Intro
Computer vision already powers self-driving cars, the gaming world, and numerous other products. Within sport, this technology has already made its way into basketball, football, baseball, soccer, etc. - and has further fueled their respective analytics movements. One of my favorite articles that encapsulates what this work allows for is from Brian Macdonald. Published in [...]
2021 NCAA Tournament Predictions
December 18th: Updated predictions moving into the Finals are live Had a great week in Columbus - and now we're down to the final two. Our model likes Wisconsin over Nebraska 58/42 But personally...I think Nebraska is on a heater and they're gonna take this thing tonight...we shall see. December 14th: Updated predictions moving into [...]
VolleyDork Rankings: How They Work
Motivation While trying to adjust our expected points (PWP) model to account for team and opponent strength, we ran into a few issues. As far as we could tell, the only analytics-based rating system out there was the Pablo rankings, and we wanted ratings that (1) are not paywalled, (2) can be reproduced by other [...]
2022 D1 Women’s VolleyDork Rankings – Updated Weekly
This marks our second season of our new rating system [link to the rating system explainer post]. Our goal will be to update these rankings every Monday / Tuesday...ish First and foremost, huge thanks to Professor Dwight Wynne for doing the heavy lifting and getting this system off the ground. I'm excited to see the [...]
Rethinking Volley 